Using flash is the perfect way to capture Christmas portraits in difficult mixed lighting. Follow the steps in our tutorial and find out how to use simple flash techniques to take natural-looking family portrait photography this Christmas.

Photographing small subjects often requires cropping photos later on the computer. Our latest Photoshop tutorial shows you how to expand your smaller subjects and enlarge subjects the safe way – at printable sizes – in any version of Photoshop CS or Elements.

Some photographers employ the processing powers of packages like Photoshop CS5 or Photomatix to bracketing exposures to combine into a single composite high dyanmic range image that reveals fine detail in the shadows, midtones and highlights. HDR photography editing techniques add rich (and sometimes false) colours that enhance the artistic look of a shot, and many even like the way the HDR process can add artefacts such as halos around object edges.

Give your awkward portraits a Photoshop face lift. Our step-by-step Photoshop Elements tutorial shows you how to swap faces so you can rescue your portrait photography by changing a bad expression into a smile.

There are two basic types of noise you need to tackle in your low-light photography. The first is Chrominance noise, which introduces itself with higher ISO shots and can be recognised by its coloured speckling in shadowed or even-toned areas.

The second is Luminance noise, which is trickier to remove and can be seen in the form of random variations of brightness between pixels. Reducing this can result in a loss of overall image detail, so in this tutorial we’re going to look at techniques to reduce both types of noise while preserving quality.

Remember that the version of Adobe Camera Raw in Elements is stripped-down compared to Photoshop proper, and that you won’t be able to target specific areas of your image to make localised adjustments.

So a solution is to produce two or more versions of your raw file, then open them in Photoshop or Elements, combine them as layers in a single image and use layer masks to hide or reveal adjustments in specific areas. Here’s how it’s done…

In the first part of our new Shoot Like A Pro series on mastering black and white photography, we explained how to compose for black and white photos – and what subjects work best. In the second post in the series we start to look at best practice post-shoot. We’ll look at how to take control of black and white conversion, and the subtleties of doing it both in Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS.

Recently we showed you how to add autumn colour to your spring or summer photos. In this post we’ll show you how to take your actual autumn photos and boost the colours subtly for pictures that pack more of a punch.